Developing Requirements for Data Warehouse Systems with Use Cases

Intelligent and comprehensive data warehouse systems are a powerful instrument for organizations to analyze their business. The implementation of such decision systems for an enterprise-wide management and decision support can be very different from traditional software implementations. Because data warehouse systems are strongly data-driven, the development process is highly dependent on its underlying data, which is generally stored in a data warehouse. Since data warehouse systems concern many organizational units, the collection of unambiguous, complete, verifiable, consistent and usable requirements can be a very difficult task. Use cases are considered as standard notation for object-oriented requirement modeling. In this paper we show how use cases can enhance communication between stakeholders, domain experts, data warehouse designers and other professionals with diverse backgrounds. We introduce and discuss three different abstraction levels (business, user and system requirements) of data warehouse requirements and show how use cases can be drivers for the requirements development.